


in and out with me (a little shadow grows)

by Victoryindeath2



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [201]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Frog is a brave little bby, Gen, I had to reread chapters of within the hollow crown for this do you know how painful that was, and sad best boy Maedhros, and what is loyalty if not a facet of love, loyalty has to begin somewhere folks, the good gollumy Frog returns, there is some implied nastiness in this fic but it's not at the forefront, with Sticks in tow, yes he's still sad he's always sad you must have noticed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23195545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/pseuds/Victoryindeath2
Summary: Something is coming.Frog is a Watcher.
Relationships: Maedhros | Maitimo & Amlach
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [201]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	in and out with me (a little shadow grows)

The hot, windless days have begun, though it is not yet full summer. It is dangerous to sun oneself in the open, so Frog likes to tuck himself in shadow, or perhaps in a stack of hay or a lump of wild grass, wilted and turned over. He is a curious sort of creature, a little creeping thing, whom nobody sees and almost nobody knows.

That is just the way he likes it. That is Safe.

He cannot bury himself today, cannot find a quiet spot in which to hide. Down by the fields, he is just a call away from Belle, who is nestled warmth at night, but he cannot tug a blanket over them both when the day flares bright. Belle is too _seen_ under the sun, too tall to bend and scurry at a moment’s notice—a steady, twisted tree-woman she is (yes, yes, her eye-less dark, like a burnt out branch stump, and the gnarl of her lips).

Frog does not go to Belle, does not cling like a burr to her ragged trousers as she lurches down harvest rows with a heavy bucket, digging up rocks. Perhaps he should sneak away to the fresh-built barn and its rafters, though the horses below sometimes make him tremble, the way they huff into floating dust, the way their bones snap when they shift, and the way they snap bones under their hooves.

A shake—Frog clutches at his shoulders, burying his mouth in his elbow. He smells his own sweat, and licks it with a darting tongue. Salt, not blood.

Something is coming.

Frog knows this the way he knows anything—he watches his insects. (They are not _his_ , not like that. They have their own shelter and their own people.)

Look at this now. So many ants, hustling and bustling and lugging grains of dirt and sand much larger than they are. No straight lines, only a focused frenzy. They are making their home stronger.

Something is coming.

The bees have stopped humming. Frog has not lazily turned his little ear away from the buzz of the fuzzy creatures for some time.

Now, he lowers himself flat almost to the ground, and inches forward. If the spider he saw earlier in the afternoon has begun to spin faster and faster—

Something is—

Frog looks up.

_Too damn dry and damn it if it won’t be dry till the cold comes,_ Frog has heard the Snake Man say around his pipe, when Frog was again where he should not be but is never found. 

_Rain comes from the sea_ , Belle has whispered only once, _but the mountains get in the way_.

(Belle does not look toward the sea—the invisible sea—when she says this, only runs her gentle fingers through Sticks’ hair and clucks at Frog to come out from under a heap of old, discarded canvas so that she can detangle his. Frog does not come out.)

When Sticks tells Frog his own story (a small story, quite like him), she always repeats the same thing.

_It rained the night you was born. Mebbe you was always meant to be a hopper._

Rain is coming. It is impossible, that’s what everyone said, but yellow-grey storm clouds have worked their way laboriously across the sky. Caught briefly on the tense shoulder-blades of the far off cousins of the dark, dark Mountain, a few shreds have escaped and, belying their girth, now release a deluge that could not go unmarked unless one lay enchained and crushed in the deepest parts of the mountain’s twisting intestines.

Most of the souls the Mountain and its Master claims are not, for better or worse, so forcibly deafened and blinded.

Frog can scarcely believe his eyes, the way the rain falls with the sun, but his tingling skin warns him to _move_.

Far below the Mountain and the awful fortress hollowed out there, the irregular rain torrents down and turns dusty fields into mud that squelches between toes and underneath boots. Thunder booms louder than the railroad’s distant dynamite, and a grey darkness descends. Thus, the overseers pull their wide-brimmed hats down, shielding their bristling moustaches from danger, and, far before the bell for dinner sounds, they shout and wave their sticks and whips, sending the thralls under their command running for ramshackle shelters.

Work will have to wait till the morrow.

Soon not a soul, miserable or otherwise, can be seen, and so it remains for the length of time it would take a beetle to scurry from the guardhouse shanty door to the half dug well around the corner, if one remembers that beetles do not always crawl in straight lines.

At last, the rain relents, and falls instead of drives, and from underneath a flat empty wagon shoved up against the side of the sturdy new stable, a little creature creeps. Frog’s brown fingers press into the mud just in front of his toes, and water dances down his bareskin back, but he makes not a peep, nor any other sound. Instead, he turns his face up to the cool rain and scrunches his nose till his black black eyes are naught but tarry slits.

Straight across the yard is a collection of tents, crowded together like too many teeth. They are all more or less weather-beaten and sagging around their frames, and some canvases are little more than sheets, sieving water between the weaving, so small in area it is a wonder that anybody, even a threadbare thrall, could crawl underneath. However, a few tents are of better quality and size, constructed of heavy canvas draped over wooden poles. From the largest of these, smoke curls out of a makeshift, stove-pipe chimney.

( _There’s got to be an order to things,_ the Snake Man says, _and that order is horses, gunmen, and animals_.

Thus, the stable went up first, with the best of wood, the straightest nails, and the most bloody welts for ill work. The barracks for the overseers, for the men who are allowed to carry guns and do whatever they will, those will be built soon, when enough trees have been cut, or material shipped in. Most of the overseers sleep in tents, just as the thralls do, though many of the latter must huddle together under the open sky, too many for the amount of canvas in this part of the world.)

Smoke wafts through the air, stinging Frog’s eyes warmly, carrying with it the promise of something to put in an empty belly. A flap in the cooking tent falls back just enough for a little orange light and a reed-thin girl to slip through.

It is Sticks. She hunches over, twisting bony fingers in her tow-colored hair. An overhang of canvas propped up by one long stick jammed in the wet earth just barely shields her from the weather.

“Frog,” she calls in a whisper that gets lost in the fuzz of rain pattering upon earth, wood, and tin.

Frog is very good at hearing what no one thinks he can or should hear. Thus, he flicks a glance her way, and when the girl motions urgently with both hands, begging him to run to her, he beckons her in turn with tiny cupped fingers.

The girl throws a tattered cloth over her head, as though it were a shawl, and darts across the yard.

“Frog,” she says, gripping him about his sharp little shoulders, “you hafta come before you’re seen. Food’s ‘bout to be served, and the bad ‘uns will come for their supper, too.”

Frog only pats Stick’s hand, smearing it with mud, and then points at the sky before wiggling his fingers and tapping them against the black hair plastered atop his head.

The girl softens, her lips cracking ever so little, parched earth. “Feels nice, don’t it?”

Sticks can be snappish, like a turtle or a monstrous horse that doesn’t want metal shoved in its mouth, but she likes Frog to be happy.

She always makes sure he gets bread to eat.

Frog feels very warm inside, just as warm as his skin feels cool, and he curls his arms around his spindly legs and rolled up trousers. He sits there like that, and Sticks lets him, and the last drops of rain fall to the ground, vanishing from sight and sound.

Suddenly it came, suddenly it went, and suddenly—

The door of the crooked guardhouse off to the right swings open without warning. In the white shock of the _we-musn’t-be-seen_ seconds before anyone steps out, Sticks blinks then grabs Frog’s hand and tugs roughly.

It is too late, the overseer appears, a man with a patchy beard and a grimy bandana caught in his belt, and Frog shares in Sticks’ trembling knowledge of discovery—but here is an unfrayed thread of luck: the overseer’s attention is behind him, he is roaring at someone to fetch another jug of whiskey, and stoutly denying that he used any trickery to win his last hand at cards.

Only thralls speak softly in this world.

It is far to the tent Sticks came from, yet she almost looks as though she will chance it, dragging Frog along behind her.

If their luck does not unravel, perhaps she thinks they might reach shelter before the overseer could find them where they oughtn’t be.

Frog does not know himself more or less wise, but he was a babe born into suffering, a child of rope-lashed instinct, good at hiding, good at knowing how quickly he must move to avoid sight, let alone capture.

He snaps his little jaws together, and then, awkwardly swift like a grasshopper or his namesake, he pushes off with his feet and dives back under the cover of his wagon.

He pulls Sticks with him.

The wagon’s spoked wheels are large and sturdily solid, and the girl presses her back against one, holding Frog close against her chest.

They must sink into the mud and not be seen, they cannot be seen—the mud dries too quickly, it is already turning back to dust— _cannot be seen_ —

The overseer leaves the guardhouse, stomping and huffing, another awful over-large creature willing to tread on whomever is in his way. As the door swings closed behind him, someone with a smoke-choked laugh calls, “Bring one for me, too!”

When Frog is terrified, he does one of two things. If he has the chance to slip away, he will find one of his usual hiding places where no one can find him, whether that be deep in the brush or high in rafters. However, if Sticks is nearby, he clings to her as he does now, with his little bare feet wrapped around her legs and his fists buried deep in her hair or ragged shift.

Frog’s nigh-hollow chest rises and falls unevenly as he twitches like a fawn dreaming, but even this is soundless.

“It’s alright,” the girl whispers in his ear, brushing aside his sopping wet hair. “I’ve got you, Sticks has got you.”

Frog claws a hand across her mouth, muddying her lips, before breathing heavily into his palm.

The overseer crosses the yard and disappears behind the tent with the stove. After a short time he returns, gripping two thralls just above the elbows. They are both of them girls, pale like the sand-pebbles Frog likes to dig up deep in the wild brush by the tilled and planted fields, neither of them over twenty years. Frog does not remember their names. He rarely goes near anyone beside Sticks and Belle.

He shifts in Sticks’ lap but she thrusts her small, bony hand over his eyes, shields the sight of the thralls from Frog’s darting, anxious looks, and when it is safe to make noise again, safe to whisper in between the hiss of once-rain returning to the sky in steam, she stumbles her words out like she’s pretending underneath the wagon is a Safe Place.

“Wanna listen to a story after bread? Maybe ‘bout the angels again.”

She crawls out from the wagon, tries to pull Frog with her, but he twists in her grasp, slippery as a tadpole, and bolts for the corner of the stable.

He has heard all of the stories.

Latching the tips of his fingers onto slender ledges and in between splintered wood, Frog climbs the stable walls until he reaches the small open window near the top of the barn, and through that, he disappears.

The stable rafters, though they hover over the quivering flanks of Danger, make for a dark and lonely retreat. No one ever looks up.

Safe Places. Sticks knows, and Frog feels, that there are no truly Safe Places in the world. It’s as easy to perceive as the heat of fire, the dryness of a throat without water, the suffering of the whipped as they try to sleep atop scratching straw.

As for Safe People—

“The Soldier says the children should be wary. Keep ‘em away from the muzzled one if you can.”

Frog is nestled in the middle of a heap of weeds, ripe for burning. The grasses smell very sweet. It is nicer to sleep among them than atop straw.

Water pours in spurts from the pump. Belle is very strong, which is right, since she is a tree-woman. Trees are very strong, unless they get hollowed out. Frog can hear her quite clearly, though he is hidden several feet away, though she speaks in words blurred like lines blown over with loose dust.

“I’m to haul water for the field-hands the rest of the day. Did he say why?”

“Dunno. The poor bastard’s eyes were crazed enough, but he ain’t look like he’s got the strength to kick a field mouse, let alone a kid.”

Belle heaves her water buckets off the ground. She doesn’t say anything else.

Frog flinches when the other thrall speaks again, rough voice and dull step nearer than before. Frog does not dare curl tighter around himself, lest the heap of weeds tremors and betrays him.

(Thrall or overseer, the threat of discovery awakens little worms in Frog’s stomach and sets a nasty, winged sort of creature abuzz somewhere in the center of his chest.)

“All said, best to trust the Soldier’s gut. If he don’t like someone, he’s got reason. We’ll see the new blood knows his place.” The man spits and mutters low, “The hell did he do, t’get muzzled like that? A goddamn muzzle.”

Frog grasps at his bare feet with his hands and squeezes very tight and waits for a chance to slip away to some other burrow or shadow. He has slept the heat of the day away in his nest—he has not yet seen the new thrall.

He is not even sure what a muzzle is. 

It goes all around. It’s a mask—a halter. Iron. A speck of blood, a shiny lather, just under the chin, of sweat, or drool.

The thrall with the leaf-copper hair inhales and exhales heavily through his nose as he sways by the steaming vat of tar, and all at once Frog cannot breathe. His little heart begins to beat a rapid pit-a-pat. Just as Sticks meets his gaze and motions him away, Frog scrambles back into the shadows, trembling.

It is not till he is far away, so far, scratched and cut open by a shield of brambles, that Frog allows himself to whimper.

_Frog has very few years to his life, but to him it is the longest thing he has ever known. He eats, he sleeps, he hides. He hides and he listens and he watches._

Don’t watch _, Sticks was not there to say, that morning that would bite diamond-back-cruel, deadly and bright with pain-poison. She was gathering kindling, or maybe helping Belle wash the overseers’ shirts._

Don’t watch _, nobody told Frog, and he was too young then to beg it of himself. If the wind whispered warning, or tried to blow the brown-mottled grass above his ditch so that he can scarce see through it, he did not know yet to heed the call or the sign._

_Instead, he lifted himself off his belly to his rough-patched knees, little hands pushing up from the frost-bitten ground._

_In the light of a pale pink sky, under the cry of a blue-grey falcon, hooves beat and bones broke, and the screaming was as horrid as the splintering._

_Frog’s lungs filled up his mouth, and he fled as quickly as he could crawl away, lest dangerous sound burst from his lips like blood did from the dying thrall’s._

_Horses have always frightened Frog, the way they go where the Bad Ones command. The metal shines bright in their mouths._

“Them animals don’t mean no harm. They gotta do what they been told, just like us. Can’t help it.”

Sticks has had to soothe Frog many times since that awful day, with more or less success. So many things frighten him, a little bird in a land of hawks. A mouse scampering about in an owl’s domain. 

Tonight, he waits till all is dark, stars out candles out, voices hushed and shushed. The Bad Ones are all a-snoring, excepting the few who stumble on their rounds, keeping watch. 

Frog wants to find Sticks, or even the tree-woman, wants to press his little nose into someone’s chest till they pat his head gently and even his breathe with the rise and fall of their own lungs—but he cannot go inside.

He has had a nightmare again, and he cannot go in the mess hall where the sleeping quarters are, because _he_ was there, in the dream, and now he is in _there_ , far, far too close to both of Frog’s Safe Ones. He, the metal-monster. A metal-monster still, even though the metal disappeared days and days ago, the _muzzle_ someone called it. There was blood. Frog _saw_.

(Sticks says to stay away from him. When Frog finds the courage to sleep under roof, Belle always lays herself as a wall between Frog and the grey-eyed thrall.)

It’s been nights and nights, and Frog has spent many of them miserable and alone under the open sky. He cannot sleep with Sticks, and he cannot even build a high nest in the rafters of the stable, because he has been reminded that the creatures there are monsters as well.

Sticks, tiptoeing past risk and fear, finds him back of the mess hall, curled over his knees, swaying side to side.

“If it’s them damn horses again,” she snaps in the dark. “Come inside, Frog, ‘fore you get stepped on by Larsen when he ain’t lookin’.”

Frog only falls over atop his shoulder, and Sticks grumbles as she sinks down next to him.

“Don’t chew your finger.”

Frog allows her to take his grimy little hands, to rub them in her own.

“Some horses is real gentle,” Sticks whispers after a minute.

She begins to tell him a story about her ma’s chestnut mare, and the way it used to snuffle in her palm with soft lips and ticklish whiskers, looking for oats or an apple slice, but she doesn’t get very far before Frog tugs her dress. He doesn’t say “Eat,” though he might on a time less tinged with fear, but Sticks fetches him a dry heel of bread from her pocket anyway.

Frog trusts Sticks, the only one who can hear the twitch of his brow, the wrinkle of his nose, the change of his thought.

This does not mean she is always right.

It does not mean she can drown out the heaving and stomping of the beasts when they clip-clop through his shuddering sleep.

The night stretches long. Frog is dreadful hungry, and Sticks has no more food. Frog scurries, Frog hurries, Frog does not _look_ —

(In other dreams, a faceless man tangles his fingers around Frog’s ankle, biting for blood. He is only faceless because a snake has stolen his eyes and wiped his mouth away with his tail, and now the snake is coiled, forever sick, in the cavity beneath the man’s collarbone.

After the waking and the whimpering, Sticks presses Frog’s ear against her chest.

 _There’s tales with lots of them monsters,_ she says, _but they only be wanting the whole world, and you’re barely bigger than an acorn_. She taps his nose. _Keep yourself quiet like a secret, and I’ll keep you safe till them with wings can find us again._

_Of course they ain’t here now._

_Ain’t likely they’d leave you in such a place as this, oh no._

_Oh no.)_

The pit is black and deep and was not here one day ago, two days ago. The walls are high and hard, no roots to cling to, and Sticks is saying, _come, Frog, come_ , over and over again, as though he might fly to safety. Frog does not think of the Cane Man astride his blooded horse, spitting sick satisfaction down upon the crushed ribs of a runaway thrall, of a thrall who was where he shouldn’t have been, but he _does_ feel the _no escape, the bad, bad,_ very _bad._

It trembles down his neck, down his spine, through the length of his curling fingers, and he rocks back and forth, and then—and then _he_ is here, the muzzled monster without his muzzle, and though his voice is not overseer-harsh, the _I won’t hurt you_ does not stop Frog from frantically, fruitlessly digging and clawing his way into the earth.

Not until Sticks says, “Frog, he won’t.”

Frog looks up and in the cool moonlight, he sees full on the soft silver gaze of the thrall with the red, red hair.

_They ain’t got any beards_ , Sticks has said each time she repeats the impossible story that Frog is too young to disbelieve, too orphaned to try.

Frog squirms in the straw bed-nest, squirms in between Sticks’ bent elbows, locked in her arms to keep warmth in and danger out. He is not trying to escape, not this time—rather, he is wiggling himself about so that he can reach his hand up in the dark to find, unerringly, Sticks’ face. He sighs, gently touching her eyelids with the tips of his fingers. She flutters them closed just in time.

_Yes, Frog, you know ‘em best by their eyes. They got only kindness in ‘em._

Frog has never considered, not in so many words, what kindness looks like.

The copper-crested thrall bends like the tree-woman does, stooped and sorry.

“I must lift you up.” The whisper half catches as if it crosses dry lips, broken teeth, but Frog’s ears are very sharp.

So is the fear, cutting through his own breath and frightened blood, and yet—

Frog, crouching atop the loose dirt he dug up with his own tiny paws, bides a moment for the knowing to come.

_There was a brownish baby bird once, half-stuck in a jagged, faint green shell. Frog found it under a sycamore._

_It chattered as he had never done, very loud indeed. Frog crept into the rustling fields in the dead of day, all to pinch a little bit of grain. When he returned, heavier a handful of hayseed and two pink wriggling worms, the bird was gone, the shell scattered._

_Frog buried the pieces, but he never forgot._

A new story now: Frog has fallen, wingless and unwise; Sticks, as though she were his broken shell, lies at the hole’s lip, reaching. Not a bird at all, and not a fragile egg—but all the difference in the world cannot deceive the clear-eyed moon.

There is a same-ness, from one thing to another, and a sameness as well between thrall and thrall-child that neither could guess. One is too old in self-disgust, the other too young for pride.

True kindness _must_ move, _must_ act, whether known or not, and love will have its beginning.

Frog is but a little hopper, yet he springs forward rather as a spark might leap, from dying embers into a still flickering flame.

After the red-haired angel lifts him up with warm, dirt-mottled hands, Frog cannot hide his relief in silence.

Softly, hesitating only a fraction of a second, he tilts his head at the never- _was_ -a-monster.

“Good?”

-

Frog’s new friend is often as quiet as he. He doesn’t tell stories like Sticks wants him to, doesn’t say _a long time ago_ , doesn’t say whether he had a Ma or a home that was his and his alone.

This is something of a disappointment to Frog, and yet—

The tilt of a head, the un-grimming of a jaw, the twitch of the very corner of a mouth, as a mouse’s whisker feeling its way—movement and stillness are things that tell more truthful stories than words, if one only knows how to listen.

“Russandol,” Sticks whispers like the wind, and Frog can hear the leaves turning over.

 _Angel_.

“He wants us to stay ‘way in the day,” Sticks warns, shaking her head sharp as a scrub jay. “Mebbe it’s the overseers, mebbe it’s Lem. I seen him and his mean looks. Troll.”

So Lem is a troll, and Russandol is gentle. Russandol is kind, even when he says no, or fails to let Frog clamber up his long tree-limbs to nestle in his arms. Thus, Frog follows him at a distance, sneaking.

He follows, even when Russandol is bidden to the stables, to care for the monsters there.

It is a late, dark blue summer evening, that time just after sunset when a few bright blades of orange still punch through the sky, only to be withdrawn, dripping faintly, as knives from a wound. The colors fade away, and if there is a bent-back thrall who steals a glance and trades it for a tear, he is left with nothing but loneliness.

“Barn,” growls an overseer whose skin is bark-rough from wind and wear. “Work, then food.”

The thrall turns out of line, not for the first time. Not for the first time, he receives a kick to his ankles, a strike that glances off the swollen flesh above his iron leg weight. He stumbles off to the stable door, just as he has many another night, except—except on this occasion, he is not alone.

A little crow-black shadow pads from dark to dark, avoiding lanterns and looks.

The looks are few, for thrall and overseer alike are more concerned with seeking their different suppers than in picking out skin and bones from the misty feathers of night.

The thrall (named _Maitimo_ by some, _cur_ , _bitch_ , and _whore_ by others—himself among them) creaks open the barn door and vanishes inside. 

“Russandol,” the shadow whimpers, and slips up the side of the stable to find its own entrance.

The shadows that fill the rafters obligingly slip aside to allow for one more. Frog is less afraid for himself than he has ever been—his trembling tonight is for another, for fear that copper hair might reek soon of copper blood.

However—the only crunching noise is that of a hard brush breaking the smoothness of dried mud. Russandol tends to a bay horse covered in a day’s worth of sweat and filth, and betrays no sign of finger-biting terror or hurt.

The creature is a tall thing, just as Russandol is, but its frame is sturdier. It only shifts a little, sighing, when Russandol threads his fingers through the tangled black mane, and does not snap at him with teeth or hooves when he leans shoulder against shoulder.

It does not do any of the things a monster should do.

A rising flurry of dust, stirred by the brushing, almost makes Frog sneeze into his hands. He covers his mouth, pinches his nose, and squeezes his eyes so hard they leak little tears.

Below, nothing changes, unless it were for a faint murmuring. A few words only, if words they can be called. Frog hears them but does not understand.

A moment of silence, and then—the horse nickers, a soft call from between soft lips.

( _They feel like puffed-up rose petals_ , Sticks once said, though that did not do Frog any good. He had never even _seen_ a rose.)

“I hear you.” Russandol’s voice is high and low all at once. It cracks a bit when he picks up his strange patter of nonsense once again, leaping over sounds, leaving pauses in his wake.

The horse does not seem to mind, but only flicks its pointed ears back and forth, swiveling them about.

Russandol rests his forehead against the creature again and again through the rest of his work.

After, Russandol leaves, his feet dragging. Frog’s own tiny paws catch him softly in the hay.

It is dangerous, what he is about to do, except—maybe it isn’t.

In the dark, the lantern gone, the horse looms larger than ever. But Frog’s eyes adjust, so keen they are, and he crouches in the corner of the stall until he can be sure the frightening hooves will not lift and fall in crushing surprise. 

Frog is too young to know what bravery is, exactly, nor does he understand the facets of friendship, the way one should strive to love the things a brother does, or a father, or a son. Frog, perhaps, could not even define love. Even so, Frog admires and yearns, with all the strength of his tiny grasping heart.

Frog, in his admiration, dares to imitate.

Wide black eyes, meeting in the dark. Breathless, Frog uncurls himself, unfurls himself, existing for a moment like a tremulous strip of cloth before a green storm sky. He could so easily be whipped away.

He saw, in the lantern light of earlier, that the horse’s nose was not pink but the color of his own hair. The horse’s coat, underneath the dirt, the hue of his own bronze skin.

So much sameness, where once was only fright.

Humming reed-thin, Frog reaches.


End file.
